February 14th–18th: Rain sometimes turns to hail
An extract from Light Rains Sometimes Fall: A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian
We have peregrines.
These words, unimaginable for a Londoner forty years ago, put a spring in the step. The post-war slump in their population, driven by increased pesticide use, has largely been redressed, and now they’re a common sight in city centres. Every outing to West Norwood ville brings the possibility of an encounter. Reason enough to venture outside in unpleasant conditions.
A peregrine’s natural nesting habitat is a cliff face. And London abounds with them. Charing Cross Hospital, Tate Modern, and now our local church. The male flies up into the belfry as I pass. Its partner steps aside to let it in, maybe passing comment as she does so on her spouse’s failure to bring breakfast.
Over the road, through the gates, traffic noise receding as I make my way into the cemetery. A goldcrest welcomes me with a short burst of its thin, piping song from a yew tree to my right. To the left, a robin’s shivering ribbon of song adds cheer. From somewhere, a wren, loud and sharp. And up ahead, a patch of grass becomes birds, a flurry of wings alerting me to their presence as they fly up with a chorus of tseeps. Always busy, always on the move.
Redwings. Ten, fifteen – no, twenty at least.
They’re a reassuring presence through the winter, arriving from Scandinavia sometime in October in search of milder weather and a steady food supply. The mysteries of birds are many and unfathomable, but migration is surely chief among them. When I think of it – whether it’s the winter journeys undertaken to escape the harsh north, or the long haul from Africa in search of an abundance of insects – my mind fills with questions. How do they know when to leave? How do they know where to go? How does a tidgy thing like a redwing, twenty centimetres from stem to stern, fly all the way from northern Scandinavia to West Norwood without keeling over and dying?
Not all of them do. But if death is a possibility over the roiling seas, it’s a certainty in the frozen north, so over they come. They’ll gravitate towards their favoured foods: red berries such as hawthorn in the first instance, then earthworms and other wriggling grubbers for the second half of winter. A cold patch in early spring – like the Beast from the East of 2018 – might send them to gardens in search of handouts, and the alert and sympathetic gardener will oblige by throwing out an apple or two.
They’re our smallest thrush, with a keen look enhanced by a creamy stripe above the eye. The red of the name – a soft red, the same as the bricks of the old library over the way – always seems to me to be under the wing rather than on it. But ‘red wingpit’ would be less appealing.
I stop, let them settle. Do not disturb. They’re flighty, keeping me at a distance. Fifteen metres or so, no more. Then, without prompting, they’re up and away, over my head, to another part of the cemetery, and as I crane my neck round and up to watch them pass, suddenly it’s not the birds I notice. By stealth, the last vestiges of blue sky have been engulfed by thick, dark clouds. Clouds of menace. Clouds of trouble. Clouds wanted in twenty-six states. And a relatively rare phenomenon – a drop in temperature so swift you actually feel it as it happens. From ‘pleasantly mild for the time of year’ to ‘someone’s just bundled me into an industrial freezer’ in ten seconds flat.
It starts as rain – heavy, fat, splashing drops blattering down like clumsy fingers on a piano keyboard. And now hail, the closest thing we’ve had to a wintry shower in months. They’re not big stones, no more than grains really. But I’m in the middle of them, which isn’t the position you’d choose when it comes to hailstones. They’re not
big enough to hurt, and they’re gone in a couple of minutes, but file them under ‘inconvenient’.
‘There’s no such thing as bad weather,’ Alfred Wainwright once said. ‘Just the wrong clothes.’ He was right, I suppose. Although possibly also a trifle smug.
You have been reading an extract from Chapter 3 (‘Rain Sometimes Turns To Hail’, which covers 14–18 February), from Light Rains Sometimes Fall: A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian. You can buy a copy here.
